


Malaise

by codswallop



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Caretaking, Fever, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Katsu cameo, M/M, Six cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21793381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codswallop/pseuds/codswallop
Summary: There were days, Thaniel thought crossly, rubbing his temples, when he could have done without the annoyance of living with a mad prescient mechanical genius.Or: Thaniel is unwell, and Keita is unconcerned.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 24
Kudos: 101
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Malaise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bodldops](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bodldops/gifts).



There were days, Thaniel thought crossly, rubbing his temples, when he could have done without the annoyance of living with a mad prescient mechanical genius. There was some days, such as today, for instance, when there was very little to choose from between his current situation and going back to the austerity of his prison-like Pimlico cell.

It had been quiet there. The creaking of ships in the harbour, that was all. (Thaniel’s mind conveniently swept the memory of the upstairs lodger’s heavy boots, and George’s drunken serenades, beneath a rug of forgetfulness.) There’d been no pitched battles in the everlasting war between the Haverlys and Six beneath his bedroom window; no chorus of clocks striking the quarter hour in an uncharming cacophony; and no silver-tinged footsteps on the bloody stairs while he was trying to transcribe a symphonic accompaniment, for the hundredth time, when he’d already said he didn’t want anything, not even tea—

“Sorry,” Mori murmured. The note of apology added a brushed tone to the rose-gold of his voice. “You’ll be needing these soon, I think.” He laid a stack of freshly-ironed handkerchiefs on the drafting table next to Thaniel’s elbow.

Thaniel looked at them in bewildered irritation for several blinks, wondering if it was an ill-timed joke, and whether he’d be justified in throttling Mori if it were. Then, without warning, the tickle in his throat he’d been trying to ignore all morning rose suddenly up into his nasal passages, and he grabbed for the topmost handkerchief only just in time to protect his transcription from an explosive sneeze.

*

By late afternoon, Thaniel had taken to his bed, heavy-limbed and lightheaded, still unreasonably irritated with Mori for having known to turn down the covers and bring up a cup of tea for him. 

“Thanks,” Thaniel said, grudgingly, because his throat was awful now and he felt bitterly cold, cold to the bone; tea might help, as much as he hated to admit it. He sipped, and screwed up his face. “Ugh. Horrible. What is this? It’s not green.”

“It’s an infusion. Willow bark, and some herbs. It will help with the fever.”

Thaniel frowned. “Am I feverish?” He touched the inside of his wrist to his own forehead, as if that would tell him anything; he felt cold, not hot.

“Not yet,” Mori assured him, leaning over to press his lips to the spot Thaniel had just touched. 

“Right,” Thaniel sighed. “So I’ve that to look forward to.” He felt muffled and dull. Everything had gone to shades of brown and ochre. 

“Nothing too terrible. You’ll feel better in a day or two.”

“Well, you’d know,” Thaniel said, aware that he was being peevish. He took a bitter swallow from the cup he was holding, made another face, and tried to hand the cup back to Mori, who closed his hands back around it and pressed it close to Thaniel’s chest.

“Six wants dinner,” Mori said. “I’ll bring up some soup later on, if... Drink your tea, Thaniel.” He brushed his fingers lightly across Thaniel’s cheekbone and gave him a warm, fond look. Thaniel wasn’t at all in the mood to appreciate it. When Mori left, he set the tea aside and burrowed under the covers, hoping for the oblivion of sleep.

*

The diamond-paned window in Thaniel’s bedroom cut the moonlight into odd shapes where it fell onto his blankets. They were nearly in a regular pattern, but not quite, and the disharmony made Thaniel’s ears ring and his spine ache. He traced the diamonds of light with his fingers and shifted in the bed, trying to make them come out in a cleaner key, but it only seemed to make things worse. Closing his eyes also made the pattern worse; now the uneven diamonds throbbed and warped, their colours vibrating and jangling against the walls of his skull.

Time stretched and wavered. Then the door handle moved, and Mori appeared, silhouetted in the golden spill of light from the upstairs hall. He moved soundlessly across the room and sat on the edge of the bed, placing a blue bowl on the table next to it. Thaniel watched him, dully. It was like watching a dream shape itself out of moonlight and perch by his side. He couldn’t have said with great certainty whether he was awake or asleep. 

Mori—if it was Mori—picked up the cup of tea he’d left there earlier, still nearly full and long gone cold. He sighed, pressed his palm against Thaniel’s face, shook his head at him, then took a damp, lemon-scented cloth from the blue bowl and laid it across Thaniel’s forehead. 

“Thank you,” Thaniel rasped, through the gravel in his throat. “If you’re a vision, at least you’re a vision bearing gifts.”

“Hush,” said Mori, and raised one of Thaniel’s hands briefly to his lips. “If I make you more tea, will you drink it?”

“I don’t know,” Thaniel told him. “Will I?”

Mori lifted one shoulder, let it drop, and tilted his hand in the air from side to side. “I never know, with you. I would advise it. You’re in for a long night if you don’t.”

Thaniel’s eyeballs felt hot, and he closed his eyelids over them, but it didn’t help. Mori adjusted the cloth on his head and flipped it to its cooler side. “You don’t seem terribly concerned,” Thaniel observed.

“You’ll live,” Mori said, and the note of amusement in his voice cut through the sour orange heat suffusing Thaniel’s brain and turned it down to a warm glow.

“Mm. Sure about that?”

“Quite sure this time,” said Mori, and rose from the bed. “I’ll go and make the tea.”

Something caught at the edge of Thaniel’s mind. “Keita,” he said, half rising onto his elbows, plucking up the cloth when it fell from his brow. Mori turned back, a dark slender shadow in the doorframe. “Have there been other times, then?”

He didn’t need to explain. Mori went still. Then: “Lincoln, April of seventy-seven was a bit touch and go. And there could have been an accident at Victoria station when you first moved to London, but that was easy enough to rearrange.” 

Thaniel felt as though all the air in the room had gone thin. “I had typhoid fever, in seventy-seven,” he said. 

“You did,” Mori agreed.

“Annabel came to visit and found me in a state. She’s still never quite forgiven me. The old Duke found out somehow and sent a doctor round; we’d never have been able to manage the fee on our own. He died before I could send a message to thank him.” Thaniel paused while the well-known, well-worn furniture of his mind rearranged itself into new places. It was a deeply unsettling sensation. “It wasn’t the Duke,” he said. “Was it?”

“It was nearly ineffectual,” Mori said, and Thaniel had to strain to hear him. “The state of English medicine...but the vaccine won’t be invented for over a decade yet. Still, it was better than doing nothing.” He hesitated again, gave a jerky nod, and vanished from the doorway. Thaniel heard his footsteps on the stairs in a rapid descending scale a moment later.

The moon had risen further in the sky, and the diamond patterns of the window panes were falling on the floor, now, instead of the bed. They looked less distorted against the smooth wooden planks, and Thaniel found that if he gazed at them intently, they connected themselves with branches of ideas in his mind, which he could trace back to their origins by following the lines of shadow and light. It seemed to him, in a sudden flash of revelation, that this must be how Mori saw the world of events, that he’d unlocked a visual code to the fractals of possibility that shimmered out from every small occurrence. 

Then Thaniel blinked, and he was only hot and muddled again, staring at a patch of moonlight on his floor. When Mori returned with his tea, he obediently swallowed down the bitterness and subsided into his pillow, letting his thoughts float formless and chaotic. Mori, now in bed beside him, renewed the compress with cool water from the blue bowl and touched it to his temples, his wrists, to the base of his throat, and Thaniel drifted off to the susurrations of Japanese endearments and gentle scoldings and reassurances. 

*

It was morning. Very early morning, if the quality of light against the backs of Thaniel’s eyelids could be trusted. A sea-coloured clicking and a white whisper of fabric disturbed the swirl of Thaniel’s thoughts before they could settle into anything he could fix upon, and he sighed. “Six,” he said, without opening his eyes, and a tiny indignant squeak from the hallway confirmed his guess. “Scamper on, mouse,” he told her, after clearing the thickness from his throat. “It’s too early; you and Katsu both need your rest. Anyway, I’m infectious.” He sneezed at her, not quite deliberately.

“Katsu is _mechanical_ ,” Six said in a small cross whisper. Thaniel opened his eyes in time to see her white nightdress and a flash of dandelion-clock hair disappear from the edge of his doorway. 

“You’re not,” he told her. “Back to bed, and I won’t mention this to Keita.” He had a sudden urge to get up and carry her back to her room; he craved the solidity of her weight in his arms, the sweet stickiness of her breath in his ear, the comfort-seeking cling of her limbs wrapped around his body. 

“Katsu has a message for you,” Six whispered intensely, invisibly, and she pattered off. 

The little octopus had ventured into the room and wound itself up the bedpost during this brief exchange, and Thaniel saw that he had something speared to one of his tentacles: a scrap of paper, which he proffered politely to Thaniel as he came up to rest on the pillow beside him. Thaniel took it. It contained a sprawl of Japanese characters in a childish hand, describing a terrible skirmish which had taken place in the garden on the previous afternoon. Its victor was unclear, but there had apparently been bloodshed and great loss of life, followed by biscuits. 

Thaniel was still smiling at the paper when Mori appeared with a fresh cup of foul-smelling tea. Mori took the paper from him, glanced at it, then put it aside and waited for Thaniel to sit up in bed so he could hand him the teacup. “I think she’s formed an alliance with the next-to-youngest Haverly,” Thaniel told him, and sipped at the bitter brew. 

Mori went around the bed and lifted Katsu down from the pillow, setting the octopus on the floor, where he ticked quickly away and climbed up into his nest in Thaniel’s dresser. There was a pleased-sounding little trill as he settled into the freshly laundered socks, and then silence. Mori got into the bed and rested his head in the spot that Katsu had vacated. He looked tired. And content.

“Thank you for looking after me, Keita,” Thaniel said. “I mean...not only last night.” It was too nakedly sincere of a statement, but he felt light, lightheaded, scoured and cleansed by the fever, and he couldn’t think of another way to clothe the words. Mori frowned a little, but not as though he were really displeased. 

“It’s mainly self-serving.” Mori stretched across the pillow to brush a kiss against the underside of Thaniel’s jaw, just below his ear, then bit him lightly in the same spot, making him laugh and shiver. “You’re very useful for reaching things on some of the taller shelves, and for changing the lightbulbs.”

“Mm,” Thaniel agreed, and took another drink of his tea. Mori’s hand came up to rest warmly on his chest, and the weight of it contained all the things Thaniel knew he wouldn’t allow himself to say aloud. He covered it with his own, and they stayed there like that, until the sun had risen enough to banish all the shadows from the room, and Six woke up again and came barreling in to demand her breakfast.


End file.
